Mark Dowie: On the Fly Podcast: Todd Gitlin On America’s Divine Exceptionalism

Today marks the first installment of On the Fly, a new series of audio interviews conducted by Guernica editor-at-large Mark Dowie for Talking Point Radio (of which Dowie is the founder). The inaugural episode features sociologist Todd Gitlin, whose latest book, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, argues that the relationship between America and Israel is steeped in the belief that both nations were “chosen” by God. Gitlin says, “I’d been troubled by the idea of chosen-ness for a while.” This mentality of divine exceptionalism (the notion that God is always on our side) is dangerously prominent in American foreign policy. Gitlin points us to the Bush administration, which he says brought us “eight years of messianic lunacy.” The interview is broken up into two parts below.

Part One:

Part Two:

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Mark Dowie is an editor-at-large at Guernica, an investigative historian and the author of seven books, including Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, American Foundations: An Investigative History, and, most recently, Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples. During his thirty-five years in journalism Dowie has won nineteen journalism awards and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

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